Hans Rustad Tom Wolfe er intervjuet i FT Weekend, og synes ustyrtelig vittig, skarp og original.
And yet there is a palpable sense that history – not the glacial movement of impersonal forces, but the swift and momentous events created by people – has been made on the banks of the Potomac in the reign of Bush the Younger. It seems compelling material for a writer who dissected the interaction of ideology and personality on culture so artfully in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.
But Wolfe claims no interest. «I have never wanted to cover politics, except in Caribbean countries,» he says. «The United States is so stable that political victories consist of minor variations. Our government is like a train on a track, and there are people on the right-hand side and on the left screaming at the train. But the train has no choice: it’s on a track! It just keeps going. And it’s really quite marvellous how stable that situation is. You can’t suddenly have parliament deciding there has to be an election.
«And when the most unbelievable things happen, there’s no backlash. For example, when Richard Nixon was forced out of office, he really had no choice. Now did a junta rise up? No. Were there any demonstrations by Republicans? No. I don’t even know of anybody throwing a brick through a saloon window – [even] a drunk Republican. Everybody, like me, sat back and watched it on TV. It was an event on television, nothing really.»
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In one sense Wolfe’s view of democracy in action is reassuring: Iraq, too, will pass, though such disengagement might equally appear unnerving, as events in that country fail to pass into history quickly enough.«Bush has, essentially, a couple of years to rectify things,» he says. «Right now there doesn’t seem to be any possible way, but who knows?
«Everything that’s said now was said about the war in Vietnam,» he continues. «It was also said that we had a very stupid president. You should have been here when Eisenhower was president; he was not very good in a press conference because he would start a sentence with a relative clause and by the time he started adding more relative clauses and appositions, he never got to the subject or the predicate. So he was called really stupid. How can this guy run the country? But, you see, all he did was win World War II! There must have been something there!
«Very few people remember the way Reagan was portrayed as an idiot,» he adds, citing a comment by Henry Kissinger that, after 20 minutes in Reagan’s company, one found oneself asking: «How on Earth can the fate of the free world be in the hands of this man?» And yet for all that, says Wolfe, Reagan kept making the right decisions.
«Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.» He laughs, possibly at the idea of New York’s literary-set frothing into their cappuccinos over the latest blow in a long but low-intensity conflict. (In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the «chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic», after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Three decades later Silvers published Norman Mailer’s review of A Man in Full, in which the veteran pugilist remarked that reading Wolfe’s 742-page novel of power and racial politics in Atlanta was like «making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.») «Unfortunately,» continues Wolfe, possibly sensing that making someone look like a slug is neither very presidential nor very promising, «We don’t win wars with literature.»
Wolfe leser ikke ny skjønnlitteratur. Ikke noe av det kan komme opp mot god dokumentarlitteratur.
When it comes to literature, Wolfe avoids younger writers, except when it comes to non-fiction, where his definition of young will be welcomed by many. «Michael Lewis, in my pantheon, is the highest-ranking young writer,» he says of the author of Liar’s Poker, an account of working at Salomon Brothers. Lewis was born in 1960. «Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down, also wrote a wonderful book, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the [1980] hostage crisis in Iran, which is so far above any novel written by a young writer today.» Bowden was born in 1951.
